AllThingsD » Juniper Networkshttp://allthingsd.com
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14422You Won't Believe All the Crazy Hardware the NSA Uses for Spyinghttp://allthingsd.com/20131230/you-wont-believe-all-the-crazy-hardware-the-nsa-uses-for-spying/
http://allthingsd.com/20131230/you-wont-believe-all-the-crazy-hardware-the-nsa-uses-for-spying/#commentsMon, 30 Dec 2013 20:15:04 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=382122Over the weekend we learned a lot about the National Security Agency’s Access Network Technology, or ANT, division, that, in the words of Der Spiegel, the German news magazine that first disclosed it based on leaked documents from Edward Snowden, can break pretty much any lock on any computing or network hardware you can think of.

Now we can see the catalog itself. Courtesy this post on Leaksource, you can flip through the numerous single-page descriptions of the NSA’s specialized hardware.

For example, there’s FEEDTHROUGH, a method for gaining access to firewalls from Juniper Network’s Netscreen product line. There’s also JETPLOW, which burrows into firewalls from Cisco Systems. In a stroke of irony that will not be lost on anyone, there’s HEADWATER, which is used on routers from China’s Huawei.

Here are a few more that caught my eye: NIGHTSTAND, a mobile Wi-Fi exploitation and insertion device “typically used where wired access to a target is not possible.” PICASSO is an otherwise typical, if outdated, GSM wireless phone (including two models from Samsung) that “collects user data, location information and room audio” and allows data to be collected via a laptop or via SMS “without alerting the target.”

And this one blows my mind: COTTONMOUTH-I. To the untrained eye, it looks like a typical USB plug at the end of an otherwise unremarkable USB cord. Inside there is a motherboard that provides a “wireless bridge into a target network as well as the ability to load exploit software onto target PCs.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131230/you-wont-believe-all-the-crazy-hardware-the-nsa-uses-for-spying/feed/0Violin Memory Fires CEO Basile as IPO and Quarterly Results Disappointhttp://allthingsd.com/20131216/violin-memory-fires-ceo-basile-as-ipo-and-quarterly-results-disappoint/
http://allthingsd.com/20131216/violin-memory-fires-ceo-basile-as-ipo-and-quarterly-results-disappoint/#commentsMon, 16 Dec 2013 17:17:20 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=378956Violin Memory, the flash-storage player, just fired CEO Don Basile (pictured) in the wake of the lousy performance of its initial public offering and quarterly results that were worse than anyone expected.

The company named Howard A. Bain III, the chairman of its board, as interim CEO.

The news comes as Violin has turned out to be something of a disaster since its Sept. 27 IPO. Having priced at $9 a share, it opened for trading that day at $7.50, and raised $162 million in the process. Its shares have fallen by nearly 70 percent since then. And last month, it reported a quarterly loss that was nearly twice as bad as anyone expected: 85 cents a share on $28.3 million in sales. That’s versus a 44-cent loss on $32 million in revenue that analysts had expected.

Expectations had certainly been high for Violin, especially given all the venture capital money that had been poured into it. It raised at least $96 million in a pre-IPO round in February, and a year before that it raised $50 million. All told, it had raised more than $180 million over three years from venture capitalist firms including Highland Capital Partners, GE Capital, SAP Ventures, Juniper Networks and Toshiba.

Against the backdrop of last week’s IPO by rival Nimble Storage, the shares of which rose more than 60 percent in its debut, the optics of Violin’s weak performance are only getting worse, and rumors that Basile’s head was on the block have been rumbling for a few days.

According to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Basile had been granted 2.5 million fully-vested Violin shares worth $6.8 million as of today’s price before the news was announced, for getting the company to an IPO by the end of September, which he did. Overall, he owns just under six million shares of the company, accounting for about 4.6 percent of the shares outstanding.

Numerous investigations by law firms that specialize in shareholder lawsuits are under way.

Violin Memory, Inc., (VMEM), a leader in persistent memory-based storage solutions, today announced that Howard A. Bain III, Chairman of the Violin Memory Board of Directors, has been appointed interim Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Bain’s appointment follows the decision of the Board of Directors to terminate Donald Basile as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Bain will remain Chairman of the Board.

The Violin Memory Board of Directors has initiated a search process and retained an executive search firm to identify a permanent CEO.

Mr. Bain, who has served as Violin Memory’s Chairman since August 2013 and as a member of the Board since October 2012, brings to the Company over 40 years of operational, financial and leadership expertise, having served as Chief Financial Officer at several public companies, including Portal Software, Inc., Vicinity Corporation, Informix Corporation and Symantec Corporation. He has significant industry experience having served in senior management positions at various technology companies in the areas of semiconductor devices and manufacturing equipment, laser-based large screen projection systems, and computer disk drives. In addition, Mr. Bain has served as a consultant on corporate governance issues since 2004, and is a Governance Fellow with the National Association of Corporate Directors.

David Walrod, Chairman of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of the Board of Directors, said, “The Board believes this leadership change is necessary to enhance the management team’s operational focus and ability to execute the Company’s plans for profitable growth. We are, however, fortunate to have someone with Howard’s extensive operational, financial and leadership experience ready to assume the role of interim CEO at this important juncture for the Company. During his time as director of Violin Memory, Howard has gained a deep understanding of the Company’s products, customers, strategy and management team, as well as the significant growth opportunities in the enterprise memory market. We are confident that he is the right person to lead Violin Memory while we search for a permanent replacement to fill the CEO role.”

“Violin Memory is focused on maintaining the operational flexibility to manage through the emerging dynamics of our industry, with financial resources on hand to achieve our objectives. While our fundamental strategy to drive growth remains unchanged, we will pursue additional tactical initiatives to improve the overall cost efficiency of the business and improve sales leverage through our partner and indirect channels. We have a robust product roadmap in place that positions us well to take advantage of the transition to a memory-based data center and build an even stronger future for all of our stakeholders,” said Mr. Bain. “Having served as Chairman of the Board, I am well aware of the many opportunities ahead and look forward to engaging with the Company’s customers, team members and shareholders in the coming weeks. Most importantly, I am confident in our team’s ability to execute and provide our customers with the high level of support and service that they have come to expect from us.”

About Howard A. Bain III

Howard has served on our board of directors since October 2012. Since 2004, Mr. Bain has been an independent consultant in all aspects of corporate finance. Mr. Bain has served as Chief Financial Officer at several public companies including: Portal Software, Inc. from 2001 to 2004, Vicinity Corporation in 2000, Informix Corporation from 1999 to 2000, and Symantec Corporation from 1991 to 1999. Prior to that, he served as a Senior Audit Supervisor at Arthur Andersen LLP, where he was a certified public accountant.

He is also a Governance Fellow with the National Association of Corporate Directors. Mr. Bain has served on the board of directors of Nanometrics, Inc. since April 2008, Learning Tree International, Inc. since 2001, as well as Nok Nok Labs, Inc. a private venture capital financed company. Mr. Bain holds a B.S. in Business Administration from California Polytechnic University. Mr. Bain’s significant Board, operational, financial expertise, including his experience as Chief Financial Officer at several public companies, as well as his experience in various technology companies in the areas of semiconductor devices and manufacturing equipment, laser-based large screen projection systems, and computer disk drives is directly relevant to Violin’s business and his responsibilities to the Board.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131216/violin-memory-fires-ceo-basile-as-ipo-and-quarterly-results-disappoint/feed/0Stealth Networking Startup VIPtela Raises $33 Million From Sequoiahttp://allthingsd.com/20131210/stealth-networking-startup-viptela-raises-33-million-from-sequoia/
http://allthingsd.com/20131210/stealth-networking-startup-viptela-raises-33-million-from-sequoia/#commentsTue, 10 Dec 2013 15:43:11 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=377818There’s a new stealth mode company to start watching in the software-defined networking space, and it is already raising some significant money.

Sources familiar with the matter tell AllThingsD that VIPtela, a networking startup based in San Jose, Calif., has secured a $33 million investment from Sequoia Capital in a deal led by the firm’s managing partner, Michael Goguen. A source at the company confirmed that Sequoia has made an investment (it even says so on its relatively bare website), but declined to confirm the amount. Sequoia declined to comment beyond also confirming that it had made an investment in VIPtela; it, too, declined to specify the amount.

VIPtela’s founders come from some big names in the networking world. CEO Amir Khan spent three years as a product manager at Juniper Networks, and five years in a similar role at Cisco Systems. CTO Khalid Raza was a distinguished technologist at Hewlett-Packard for a year and change, following almost 18 years at Cisco. Other early employees hail from Alcatel-Lucent by way of a startup called TiMetra, which it acquired in 2003.

The company is staying mum about what it’s working on. The aim appears to be helping large companies use software to build more agile and more secure wide-area networks. With all the new demands they’re facing — between access to cloud services, and scores of different mobile devices — they’re finding that their existing networks just aren’t quite as flexible as they’d like.

One emphasis will be on reducing the operational costs of running these networks, sources familiar with the company’s plans tell me. A second emphasis will be put on enabling new methods to connect to cloud services. And a third is on security — specifically, reducing the complexity of adding strong encryption to the mix when connecting between different networks.

VIPtela’s public statements have been few. On LinkedIn, it describes itself as “… working on innovative, customer endorsed solutions for the computer networking market. Our vision is to simplify and transform the networking industry.” It has a Twitter account, but hasn’t tweeted yet.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131210/stealth-networking-startup-viptela-raises-33-million-from-sequoia/feed/0Juniper Networks Taps Barclays Veteran as New CEOhttp://allthingsd.com/20131113/juniper-networks-taps-barclays-veteran-as-new-ceo/
http://allthingsd.com/20131113/juniper-networks-taps-barclays-veteran-as-new-ceo/#commentsWed, 13 Nov 2013 18:34:32 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=372470Juniper Networks said today that it has named Shaygan Kheradpir, currently chief operations and technology officer at Barclays, as its new CEO. Kheradpir will replace outgoing CEO Kevin Johnson on Jan. 1, 2014. Johnson, who had joined Juniper from Microsoft in 2008, will remain on Juniper’s board.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20131113/juniper-networks-taps-barclays-veteran-as-new-ceo/feed/0Juniper Profit Surges as Revenue Climbshttp://allthingsd.com/20131022/juniper-profit-surges-as-revenue-climbs/
http://allthingsd.com/20131022/juniper-profit-surges-as-revenue-climbs/#commentsTue, 22 Oct 2013 21:52:11 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=367559Juniper Networks Inc.’s third-quarter profit more than quadrupled as the network-gear company recorded an uptick in revenue and lower expenses.

Juniper — along with rival F5 Networks Inc., which reports third-quarter results Wednesday — reported signs of weaker demand earlier this year. Juniper on Tuesday, however, suggested that markets are improving, with Chief Executive Kevin Johnson saying the company continues to see strong demand from its service-provider customers and is gaining traction in enterprise sectors.

Well, it only cost $7.17 billion, but Microsoft now has a pretty obvious candidate to lead the company as soon as CEO Steve Ballmer vacates the seat he said he would leave within the year: Nokia CEO Stephen Elop.

But it seems clear that the acquisition puts the former president of Microsoft’s business division in the front of the line to take over the software giant, ahead of several internal candidates and a whole lot of external ones. In fact, Elop is both external and internal.

While Elop has critics who say he did not fix Nokia or much of anything else in his long career in tech, others are likely to point to a pedigree that would also make him the favorite here (and at British bookmaker Ladbrokes already). This will doubtlessly be much-debated over the next weeks and months, as the CEO process moves to its conclusion.

But, unless co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates decides to bust a move — and he will not — it looks like this race is Elop’s to lose at this moment. That could certainly change, as we learn more about Elop’s qualifications.

I met Elop almost five years ago and was struck by the fact that he was the only exec at the company at the time who would publicly talk about how the software giant had gotten the “open” religion and was becoming “the most interoperable company in the world.”

At the time, I wrote: “I am still not sure about Microsoft, but one thing’s for sure: Elop has turned out to be one of the most interoperable of tech execs.”

Along with his stint running that powerful franchise at Microsoft, he had been COO of Juniper Networks and CEO of Macromedia, which was acquired under his tenure by Adobe.

His jump to the Finland telecom giant was a big one, given how far Nokia’s star had fallen in the mobile market, with the fast growth of the Apple iPhone and the Google Android mobile operating system.

He’s had a roller-coaster ride since then, of course, including knitting himself to Microsoft in a major partnership, and trying to turn Nokia’s fortunes around. It has been rocky, to say the least, as he has yet to bring the company back to any kind of healthy health.

While he did not start the fire, of course, selling to Microsoft is perhaps the move of someone who knew that it was an unwinnable battle without bigger hoses of money, talent and more.

Did I mention that Elop also has five kids — including triplets?

But why don’t you listen to him instead?

Here’s a video interview I did with him in 2009, when he was at Microsoft:

And here is a cool video Elop ordered up — although it was dreamed up by others — while at Microsoft, as part of an “Envisioning” series, which sketched out a world of smartphones, touchscreens everywhere, and a whole lot of innovative interacting:

Cohen (pictured from a Nicira video) left Cisco Systems to join Nicira in 2011, before it was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion last summer. Over the weekend, he changed his LinkedIn profile. His new title is chief commercial officer at Illumio. Beyond confirming the change, he didn’t have anything to say about the new company.

Also joining Illumio is Ben Verghese, a former VP and chief management architect at VMware. His title at the new company is VP of engineering.

Details about what Illumio intends to do are kind of sketchy. Its founding CEO is Andrew Rubin, a former CEO of Cymtec Systems. Its CTO and co-founder is PJ Kirner, the former CTO of Cymtec and a onetime distinguished engineer at Juniper. Its VP of product design is Alan Stokol, a former exec at Juniper and Hewlett-Packard. It is based in Santa Clara, Calif.

Illumio’s website describes its mission as “tackling the biggest challenge holding back enterprise adoption of cloud computing.” Also on its website are the three words “virtualization,” “cloud” and “security,” implying that its primary aim is to provide security for virtual machines. Aside from Andreessen Horowitz, it has also landed an investment from the Junos Innovation Fund, the investment arm of networking equipment vendor Juniper Networks. The company received an $8 million series A in March, according to Crunchbase.

Virtualization is a key technology that enables cloud computing. When a computer is virtualized, its physical hardware is carved up by software that allows one computer to act like many. In cloud computing settings, these “virtual machines” are easily spun up via software, and are usually running and configured within minutes, rather than hours, as would be required by a new physical computer. VMware is a significant vendor of virtualization technology. Virtualization is also taking hold in other parts of the data center, including networking and storage.

I’m speculating, but here’s a little about what Illumio seems to be up to: One big concern that causes some resistance by large companies to adopt cloud computing models is security. When machines in the cloud are operated off-premise by someone else, concerns linger about whether or not sufficient security measures have been taken to protect the data stored on them. Current security measures have, for the most part, been developed with physical machines in mind. There are ongoing worries that new kinds of attacks might leverage the virtualization technology itself. Secure that piece of the data-center puzzle, and you have eliminated a lot of those worries.

Nicira, you’ll remember, was once a stealthy startup, also notably backed by Andreessen Horowitz, which focused on creating virtualized networks. It was seen as an early player in the software-defined networking space. It attracted a lot of attention for the people it hired and the competitors it inspired, among them Big Switch Networks.

According to sources close to the situation, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is likely to unveil his plans to restructure the tech giant to a larger group of senior execs around the beginning of July.

That prospect has many top managers at the company worried, since Ballmer has been making these significant plans with limited consultation with the wider leadership group at the software giant. Instead, he has been working with only a small group of his direct reports and also some Microsoft board members, numerous sources said.

That has meant that most senior execs have largely been left out of the decision-making process related to Ballmer’s goal of solidifying Microsoft into the “devices and services company,” that he wrote about in his annual shareholder letter last October.

The impending changes — and the lack of information about them — has made for some level of discomfort inside Microsoft, where many high-ranking managers have been at the company for a very long time.

“It feels like it is going to be titanic — that Steve is doing this change for his legacy,” said one person close to the situation. “And it’s the first time in a long time that it feels like that there will be some major shifts, including some departures.”

That has certainly happened under Ballmer, such as when Windows chief Steven Sinofsky left the company late last year. There was also a major reorg in 2008.

Other top execs who have departed over the last several years include: Kevin Johnson, who became CEO of Juniper Networks, after 16 years at Microsoft; Jeff Raikes, who arrived at Microsoft in 1981 and is now CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and the twin departures of Robbie Bach — who was at the company for 22 years, until his retirement in 2010 — and 15-year veteran J Allard, although he remains an advisor to Ballmer.

But those were largely one-offs, and Microsoft has not seen a change like what is expected to come since some similarly dramatic rejiggerings were done by former CEO and co-founder Bill Gates during his tenure.

That’s why another source said that the level of worry has grown, since there have been rampant internal rumors about what will happen, but no real change as yet. “It would be funny if Ballmer did nothing in the end,” said the source. “But no one thinks that’s possible now.”

A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.

As I had previously reported, according to several people close to the situation, the new configuration could include larger roles for several execs, with business units being moved around into new divisions. But, sources noted, there could also be some significant departures.

Focus internally is especially strong on Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools division; Tony Bates, president of its Skype communications unit; and Don Mattrick, president of its Interactive Entertainment division. In addition, many are wondering how the job of Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s Online Services unit, will shift, as well as that of Terry Myerson, who runs the company’s Windows Phone division.

But it’s unclear how their new and perhaps expanded roles, and those of others in top management, will shake out. That is, until Ballmer weighs in.

Many expect him to soon begin unveiling his plans internally, just ahead of the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year. It’s not clear when a public announcement will be made.

One thing seems certain — a simplification of the structure to clarify its current and decidedly more convoluted set-up. And how Microsoft’s flagship software product, Windows, fits into the new org, will be the most interesting part of the puzzle.

The possible restructuring comes amid increasing investor pressure on Microsoft, including a recent run-up in its stock and a renewed effort by activist shareholders urging that some level of change take place at Microsoft.

The company will be on display to developers this coming week at Microsoft’s Build conference in San Francisco, where it will show off a series of initiatives for Windows, Bing and its servers products, among other things.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130623/update-microsoft-restructuring-nears-as-execs-top-fret-over-their-fate/feed/0Cisco Tries Reinvention in Tough Timehttp://allthingsd.com/20130513/cisco-tries-reinvention-in-tough-time/
http://allthingsd.com/20130513/cisco-tries-reinvention-in-tough-time/#commentsMon, 13 May 2013 19:42:55 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=321018Cisco Systems Inc. shares tumbled this time last year after executives warned their biggest corporate customers were ordering less equipment. If history repeats itself this week, the networking giant will join a dreary but growing club.

A wide range of companies — from Cisco rival Juniper Networks Inc. to tech juggernaut International Business Machines Corp. — have caught investors off guard in recent weeks as corporate belt-tightening saps their growth.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130513/cisco-tries-reinvention-in-tough-time/feed/0HP Makes a Big Play in Software-Defined Networkshttp://allthingsd.com/20130430/hp-makes-a-big-play-in-software-defined-networks/
http://allthingsd.com/20130430/hp-makes-a-big-play-in-software-defined-networks/#commentsTue, 30 Apr 2013 15:12:46 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=316704Companies in the networking business today like to talk a lot about software-defined networking. The basic idea is that networks should be as flexible as servers. And since a server can, via virtualization, be divided up to act like many, networking infrastructure should be similarly flexible in order to meet the more nimble needs of the modern data center.

Hewlett-Packard made a big move in that direction today, announcing a series of switches that support OpenFlow, open source software that makes routers and switches programmable and thus a lot more flexible.

The news gave me an opportunity to catch up with Bethany Mayer, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for networking. We talked about HP’s plans around SDN:

AllThingsD: Bethany, put simply, what is SDN all about, as HP sees it?

Mayer: The idea is that we’re trying to create more automation, less constraint, and have the network be more abstracted so that there are few manual processes in the data center. It’s meant to bring more simplification and flexibility to the data center. In all of these products we have enabled OpenFlow. We now have 40 platforms that are OpenFlow-enabled. And we have about 20 million ports out there in the marketplace today that are OpenFlow-ready.

How is the state of HP’s networking business, generally?

Backward-looking, we now have 13 quarters of year-over-year growth under our belt. So we’ve continued to grow the business. Our SDN strategy is getting a lot of interest in the industry. I just recently spoke at the Open Networking Summit. The amount of interest has been very high. We had about 60 customers in our SDN beta, and they’re really excited about the applications we’ve created. No one else has created a security application, a load-balancing application, so things have been very good.

And how do you see the competitive landscape? HP is a distant No. 2, but a solid N0. 2 to Cisco Systems. Do you see yourself taking business away from Cisco, or is it more complicated than that?

We’ve continued to take market share in the industry over the last several quarters, and we’ve also maintained our No. 1 position as an enterprise networking vendor in China.

And HP tends to play mostly in the enterprise networking space, but you don’t play in the carrier-class and telecom networking market where Cisco tends to dominate, correct?

That’s correct, however I would say that with this virtual services router that we just announced, that offers us some inroads in the service provider market, because there are new capabilities they are looking for, something called network services virtualization, where they are trying to virtualize functions like routing and switching, security and load balancing. The capabilities that we’re bringing to the table with this announcement makes them very interested. This allows them the ability to move toward virtualizing their networks, and avoid the amounts of money they pay for their expensive proprietary switches and routers. Our focus for disrupting the networking industry is via open standards and simplification. That’s generating strong interest from the service providers. They don’t want to spend the money on the more expensive switches and routers. The point is to help these customers break the proprietary lock, help them make their networks more agile, and meet the new needs of their networks.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130430/hp-makes-a-big-play-in-software-defined-networks/feed/0Vidyo Raises $17 Million in Round Led by Triangle Peakhttp://allthingsd.com/20130422/vidyo-raises-17-million-in-round-led-by-triangle-peak/
http://allthingsd.com/20130422/vidyo-raises-17-million-in-round-led-by-triangle-peak/#commentsMon, 22 Apr 2013 12:58:00 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=314284Vidyo, the videoconferencing startup that has been making the competitive enterprise videoconferencing business rather interesting over the last couple of years, has just closed another round of funding.

The company said today that it has closed a $17.1 million round of funding from its existing syndicate of investors, plus a new lead investor, Triangle Peak Partners. The round brings its total capital to $116 million raised since 2005.

It’s Vidyo’s fifth round of funding, the last being a $22 million series D led by QuestMark Partners. Networking company Juniper Networks later joined that with an undisclosed amount at the time, though a little back-of-the-envelope math suggests it was between $12 million and $14 million.

In a statement announcing the funding, Vidyo said it saw billings increase by 68 percent year over year. This included a 77 percent surge in its health care business, and 67 percent growth in large enterprises. Since it’s private, it doesn’t disclose revenue.

Vidyo’s secret sauce is a technology called Adaptive Video Layering. Its hardware sits in a rack in the customer’s data center and constantly watches the underlying network conditions, and then adapts to meet them while video calls are under way. If there’s a lot of interference, the Vidyo system throttles up and down on the picture and sound it’s trying to deliver, based on the condition of the network. But it also adapts dynamically to the device that’s being used: It supports Apple’s iOS devices and also Google Android devices. It’s also the technology behind Google Hangout.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130422/vidyo-raises-17-million-in-round-led-by-triangle-peak/feed/0Violin Memory Is Raising More Money Ahead of Planned May IPOhttp://allthingsd.com/20130214/violin-memory-is-raising-more-money-ahead-of-planned-may-ipo/
http://allthingsd.com/20130214/violin-memory-is-raising-more-money-ahead-of-planned-may-ipo/#commentsThu, 14 Feb 2013 22:59:54 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=295398Violin Memory, the startup building storage arrays based on flash memory technology that has recently been said to be eyeing an initial public offering, appears to have raised more money.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dated today, Violin disclosed that it is attempting to raise as much as $50 million in new funding from existing investors. The filing is an amendment to a previous one in which it disclosed an $80 million funding round. The round now has an upper limit of $130 million, of which $96.3 million has been raised from 126 investors.

According to an investor approached to participate in the deal, but who asked not to be named, Violin has raised the funding from existing investors at an implied valuation of $850 million. The money, this investor said, would be used to fund operations until Violin completes its planned initial public offering, which now has a target date of early May.

The launch of Violin’s IPO appears to have slid several times. Last April, CEO Don Basile told AllThingsD that the offering would take place no later than Oct. 27 of last year. And as recently as last month, I heard chatter that the IPO would take place during February.

Violin was said to have filed for an IPO under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, meaning the related filings with the SEC aren’t available to the public.

I called a company spokeswoman and was told the company is not commenting on financial matters.

In Violin’s last funding round, which was itself an extension of a $50 million round raised 11 months ago, GE Asset Management joined as a new investor. Other investors include Toshiba, the Japanese chip and electronics maker, and networking gear player Juniper Networks, as well as Highland Capital and SAP Ventures, the investment arm of German software giant SAP.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130214/violin-memory-is-raising-more-money-ahead-of-planned-may-ipo/feed/0Violin Memory to Acquire GridIron Systemshttp://allthingsd.com/20130118/violin-memory-to-acquire-gridiron-systems/
http://allthingsd.com/20130118/violin-memory-to-acquire-gridiron-systems/#commentsFri, 18 Jan 2013 18:20:54 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=286903Violin Memory, the company that makes flash-memory-based storage arrays aimed at the enterprise, and which is on track to an IPO sometime this year, has just made an acquisition.

Sources familiar with the matter say that Violin has acquired GridIron Systems, a company that specializes in accelerating applications that run in data centers. The deal will be announced on Monday, but financial terms won’t be disclosed.

Chatter about the acquisition first emerged on the blog of Philippe Nicolas, a French expert on the storage market and head of product strategy at Scality. He wrote on Jan. 10 that GridIron had reached a deal to be acquired, but didn’t name a buyer. He estimated the purchase price at between $200 million and $300 million.

It’s Violin’s third acquisition. The last one was the assets of Gear6 in 2010, and before that, the acquisition of the original Violin Memory stream of intellectual property. Violin is taking on about 20 employees from GridIron, and will use its intellectual property in its own storage-array products. The deal brings Violin’s total headcount to about 450.

GridIron Systems was founded in 2007, and had been backed by investments from Mohr Davidow, Foundation Capital and Trinity Ventures. It had raised about $30 million in capital.

Violin was reported to have filed for an IPO in October, but did so under the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, so the related filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission aren’t available to the public. Last year, it raised about $80 million at an implied valuation of $800 million in a Series D round from GE Asset Management; Toshiba, the Japanese chip and electronics maker; and networking company Juniper Networks, as well as Highland Capital and SAP Ventures, the investment arm of German software giant SAP.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20130118/violin-memory-to-acquire-gridiron-systems/feed/0How Big Data and Cloud Computing Are Pushing Networks to the Brinkhttp://allthingsd.com/20121015/how-big-data-and-cloud-computing-are-pushing-networks-to-the-brink/
http://allthingsd.com/20121015/how-big-data-and-cloud-computing-are-pushing-networks-to-the-brink/#commentsMon, 15 Oct 2012 13:29:30 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=260053A lot is expected of corporate networks these days. Companies are trying to add new services and support new devices. There’s always more data that has to keep flowing, more stuff being connected to it. And the network is expected to perform, no matter what. Now there are about five billion devices connected to the Internet and billions of individual users, all expecting their networks to perform.

The folks at Juniper Networks started to wonder if the world of networking has reached some kind of fundamental inflection point. They got together with the people at Forrester Research and surveyed 150 senior IT executives to try to get a better handle on how big trends facing the enterprise, like cloud computing and big data, are affecting enterprise networks.

The findings are kind of interesting and sort of troubling. While cloud computing and software-as-a-service products such as Salesforce.com tend to save money and time by taking dedicated hardware and software out of the equation, using them puts new demands on the network: 58 percent of those surveyed said cloud services had added enough demand to their networks that they had to upgrade the networking hardware.

Cloud services tend to go hand in hand with an increased usage of mobile devices: 47 percent of businesses have seen increased demand from employees bringing their own devices to work.

The complications for networks have grown past the point where you can simply add more bandwidth and hope for the best. The survey found that 86 percent of the companies in the survey have not been unable to spin up new services or support certain business demands, because their networks were simply not up to the task. Another 74 percent reported that their networks had become complex, while 35 said their networks had become “too rigid to manage.”

So that leaves IT organizations at a point where networks are under more demand than ever, and less able to meet those demands. It can’t go on like that. “We’re reaching the point where the effectiveness of networks is inversely proportional to the volume of information they contain,” Juniper CIO Bask Iyer told me last week.

The solution is to make sure that all the bits used to build the network work together well. The old way — running networks mainly by just adding more bandwidth — won’t get the job done, Iyer says. The network has to be built with overarching business objectives in mind, with teams that are usually separate — security, manufacturing, quality control — getting more intimately involved with building the network than they have been before. Naturally, that’s the opening for a larger discussion about the implications of the research. And, of course, Juniper is holding a Web event later today to explain what it means.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121015/how-big-data-and-cloud-computing-are-pushing-networks-to-the-brink/feed/0Cloud-Collaboration Service FuzeBox Hires VoIP Pioneer Michael Knappehttp://allthingsd.com/20121010/cloud-collaboration-service-fuzebox-hires-voip-pioneer-michael-knappe/
http://allthingsd.com/20121010/cloud-collaboration-service-fuzebox-hires-voip-pioneer-michael-knappe/#commentsWed, 10 Oct 2012 17:53:20 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=258715FuzeBox, the surprisingly cool cloud-based service that produces virtual meetings and collaboration sessions that actually work and allow you to get things done, has just made a key hire, sources at the company tell AllThingsD.

The company, which over the summer landed an impressive $20 million Series A round of venture capital funding from Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures, has started to ratchet up its hiring. Sometime today, it will announce that it has hired Michael Knappe, an early pioneer in the voice-over-Internet-protocol industry and a founding member of the VoIP Forum Industry Consortium. Knappe’s title will be director of engineering.

Michael Knappe

Knappe brings to FuzeBox nearly a quarter-century of telecom industry experience. He was one of the five people who started the VoIP engineering program at networking giant Cisco Systems, and was also a senior engineer at Nortel Networks. He led engineering on development of a VoIP router at Juniper Networks. and during those years he racked up 35 patents on which he was listed as co-inventor, all in the areas of packet voice, audio signal processing, and audio and video conferencing.

Over that time, he was deeply involved in the VoIP Industry Forum, one of those industry-standards-setting efforts that is so often helpful in making a new technology mainstream. By the time of its peak in 1997, companies as varied as Microsoft, Intel and Cisco were all participating members, and now VoIP is indeed mainstream.

The company is certainly moving along. FuzeBox powers 60,000 hours of audio conferences every month, but more impressively, it handles 78,000 online meetings everyday. Its customers include Amazon, CBS, Thomson Reuters and Verizon Wireless — which also resells FuzeBox to its business customers.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20121010/cloud-collaboration-service-fuzebox-hires-voip-pioneer-michael-knappe/feed/0AT&T Adds Mobile Security Service for Businesses to Growing Lineuphttp://allthingsd.com/20120924/att-adds-mobile-security-service-for-businesses-to-growing-lineup/
http://allthingsd.com/20120924/att-adds-mobile-security-service-for-businesses-to-growing-lineup/#commentsTue, 25 Sep 2012 04:00:27 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=253701Continuing its expansion in the services business, AT&T is announcing on Tuesday a service for business that combines antivirus and malware protection with tools to manage mobile devices. It builds on a deal announced earlier this year with Juniper Networks, whose technology powers the service.
]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120924/att-adds-mobile-security-service-for-businesses-to-growing-lineup/feed/0Plumgrid, Another Virtual Networking Start-Up, Raises $10.7 Millionhttp://allthingsd.com/20120808/plumgrid-another-virtual-networking-startup-raises-10-7-million/
http://allthingsd.com/20120808/plumgrid-another-virtual-networking-startup-raises-10-7-million/#commentsWed, 08 Aug 2012 07:00:22 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=238870It’s becoming readily apparent that the next big disruption coming to the data center is going to be around how all the machines in them are connected to networks both internal and external. Networks are going to be virtualized and their parameters defined in software in much the same way that we talk of virtualized servers so commonly today.

There’s been a significant uptick in M&A and VC funding activity around this idea lately. For months I had been covering the plans of the cool start-up Nicira to try and mess up the best-laid business plans of existing networking players like Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. Then, just as suddenly as it burst onto the scene, VMware, the company that basically defined virtualization inside servers and other computers, stepped up and acquired it for $1.3 billion.

Then a week later, software giant Oracle took out Xsigo Systems, another virtual networking concern, though we don’t know how much it paid.

Now we have a new player to talk about. It’s called Plumgrid, and today it will announce that it is taking a $10.7 million Series A round of venture capital funding from US Venture Partners and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Chris Rust of USVP just joined its board of directors, and Lars Leckie, a Hummer Winblad partner, is joining the board, too.

But Plumgrid is not coming out of stealth mode, at least not just yet.

I talked for awhile with Awais Nemat, (pictured) who has assembled a team of engineers from companies like Cisco, chipmaker Marvell, Sun Microsystems, VMware and even Nicira, all of them people who have contributed a lot to the concept of network virtualization and software-defined networks.

He wouldn’t tell me much about what the company is working on productwise — that’s still the stealth part. But he did tell me a bit about the kinds of problems it is aiming to solve. “There is a monumental shift coming in networking infrastructure … Networking functions that used to require a dedicated box we do in software running on standard software, running on standard silicon,” he told me.

Different kinds of companies have different kinds of networking needs, but today more often than not, all companies pick from the same set of hardware products that Cisco and Juniper and Hewlett-Packard and other networking companies offer; the primary difference has to do with whether one or the other is big enough or too big.

“We see a new kind of customer emerging, one whose demands and needs are not being satisfied by the traditional network infrastructure vendors,” Nemat said. To that end, Plumgrid is working with some early customers to define exactly what it is going to offer, essentially by defining the problems those customers have with what they can buy off the shelf today. “Empathy is turning out to be a pretty good way to design a product,” he told me.

Nemat himself is an old Cisco hand who struck out on his own to run D5 Networks, a company that designed chips for networking security. It was acquired by Marvell in 2006. He stayed on there until last year when he founded Plumgrid and raised $2 million and change in angel funding. It’s nice to have another secretive networking start-up to watch.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120724/juniper-networks-net-down-50-percent-on-weak-router-sales/feed/0Vidyo Boosts Series D With Investment From Juniper Networkshttp://allthingsd.com/20120522/vidyo-series-d-just-rose-to-97-million-thanks-to-juniper-networks/
http://allthingsd.com/20120522/vidyo-series-d-just-rose-to-97-million-thanks-to-juniper-networks/#commentsTue, 22 May 2012 16:12:28 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=210877Last month, I looked in on the latest doings of the fast-moving videoconferencing start-up Vidyo, and declared that it was “messing up” the business and seemed to be having better luck than its more established rival Polycom.

And while some people called to question that assertion, there’s no question that something interesting is clearly happening at Vidyo. Today it will get only more interesting.

You may remember how, in that previous story, I mentioned that Vidyo had raised a $22.5 million Series D round of funding led by QuestMark Partners, with Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers Group all participating. Vidyo left that round open and now Juniper has joined it though the precise amount is not being disclosed.

Today, Vidyo says its total capital raised has reached about $97 million, and that Juniper Networks is making a strategic investment by way of its Junos Innovation Fund. While Vidyo isn’t exactly saying what the terms of the investment are, it’s pretty easy to do the math. (Earlier I had portrayed this as a $97 million Series D. Clearly I got a little confused. Sorry about that.)

The investment round will basically help Vidyo boost its go-to-market activities, but it will also give Juniper a big benefit by allowing Vidyo to integrate its videoconferencing products with Juniper’s numerous offerings. That will likely give it some new competitive plays against rival Cisco Systems, which has considerable video offerings. We’ll see how that turns out.

Video Conferencing Seen as Important and Growing Sector

Hackensack, NJ – May 22, 2012 – Vidyo, Inc., the world’s fastest-growing video conferencing company, today announced that Juniper Networks, the industry leader in network innovation, is joining as a strategic investor through its Junos® Innovation Fund, alongside lead investor QuestMark Partners and other existing investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Though terms of the investment were not disclosed, Vidyo has raised $97M to date to accelerate its growth. The investment from Juniper Networks enables Vidyo to increase its go-to-market activities and integrate its video conferencing products with Juniper’s numerous offerings.

According to numerous analysts, Vidyo is disrupting innovation in the video communications and collaboration market, driving the industry forward with its paradigm-shifting platform. Vidyo delivers telepresence-quality conferencing to more than 1850 enterprise, healthcare, education, and government customers. Juniper Networks is leading the charge to architecting the new network based on a unique single architecture and single operating system, Junos®, that ensures performance, reliability and security without compromise and at the scale customers demand.

“As the use of video in the enterprise and on end devices continues to expand, our customers are seeking new ways to improve video delivery,” said Jeff Lipton, vice president, Venture and Strategic Investments, Juniper Networks. “Vidyo is an emerging player that is driving innovation in software-based videoconferencing, and we believe its leading technology will improve the experience and economics of video communications alongside advances in networking technologies.”

“Juniper Networks’ strategic investment in Vidyo is a solid endorsement of our vision and a recognition of how rapidly the videoconferencing market is expected to grow in the near future; Infonetics Research states the market will reach a cumulative $22 billion over the next 5 years,” said Ofer Shapiro, Vidyo’s co-founder and CEO. “We see Juniper as a kindred spirit, itself a pioneer in its industry, having revolutionized networking for over 16 years. Their investment validates the approach we have taken to successfully create new video conferencing markets and deliver superior value, accessibility and scalability to our customers and partners. We are extremely honored that such a world-renowned leader recognizes the unique strengths and proven abilities of Vidyo that are driving the video communications industry forward.”

The Vidyo Difference

The Vidyo communication and collaboration platform is software-based, highly flexible and can be easily customized for individual enterprise and vertical market video conferencing needs. The patented VidyoRouter™ architecture introduces Adaptive Video Layering™, which dynamically optimizes the video for each endpoint leveraging H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC)-based compression technology and Vidyo’s IP. Adaptive Video Layering eliminates the MCU and offers unprecedented error resiliency, low latency rate matching thus enabling natural, affordable, high-quality video to work over the Internet, LTE and 4G networks. The platform allows users to quickly leverage the latest hardware innovations, new consumer devices and partner applications that utilize Vidyo’s APIs, such as the recently announced partnership with Philips and AMD in the Healthcare industry. Vidyo has been active driving H.264 SVC and SIP videoconferencing interoperability in various standards bodies since 2005.

About Vidyo, Inc.
Vidyo, Inc. pioneered Personal Telepresence enabling natural, HD multi-point videoconferences on tablets, smart phones, PCs and Macs, room systems, gateways, telepresence solutions and affordable cloud-based broadcast solutions. Headquartered in the US, with 12 additional international offices, the company has more than 225 employees and has to date raised $97M. Learn more at www.vidyo.com, on the Blog or follow @vidyo on Twitter.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120522/vidyo-series-d-just-rose-to-97-million-thanks-to-juniper-networks/feed/0Violin Memory Raises $50 Million at $800 Million Valuation, May IPO This Yearhttp://allthingsd.com/20120330/violin-memory-raises-50-million-at-800-million-valuation-may-ipo-this-year/
http://allthingsd.com/20120330/violin-memory-raises-50-million-at-800-million-valuation-may-ipo-this-year/#commentsFri, 30 Mar 2012 16:26:25 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=191656Violin Memory, the company that builds storage arrays based on flash memory technology, will on Monday announce that it has raised a $50 million Series D round of funding at an implied valuation of $800 million.

The funding round includes strategic stakes from Toshiba, the Japanese chip and electronics maker; networking concern Juniper Networks; and funding from new investors, including Highland Capital and SAP Ventures, the investment arm of German software giant SAP.

Violin CEO Don Basile also told me today that the company is in the process of picking bankers that will likely lead it to an initial public offering before the end of 2012. “We had our final bake-off last week,” he told me, though he didn’t disclose who had won it.

That Violin was raising capital was disclosed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. A formal announcement on the funding will come Monday.

Violin has been growing pretty aggressively in recent months. Basile told me that the company now has 320 employees, up from 50 in the last six months. It has been building up a global sales force with 40 people working in Europe and the Middle east. That team is run by Garry Veale, the former head of HP’s Storageworks operation in Europe. Earlier this month it hired Martin Darling, a former EMC sales exec to run its sales team in Asia.

Basile says the investment will be used press down on the gas pedal and keep growing, but also to look seriously at an IPO before the end of 2012. “The funding gives us the means to grow as a private company, but also to look at the public markets if the conditions are right,” he said. “It’s more likely than not that we’ll be a public company by the end of the calendar year.”

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120330/violin-memory-raises-50-million-at-800-million-valuation-may-ipo-this-year/feed/0For Hackers, Attacking Phones and Tablets Is the New Hotnesshttp://allthingsd.com/20120215/for-hackers-attacking-phones-and-tablets-is-the-new-hotness/
http://allthingsd.com/20120215/for-hackers-attacking-phones-and-tablets-is-the-new-hotness/#commentsWed, 15 Feb 2012 13:59:47 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=174777Among the set of people who dream up new ways to attack digital infrastructure for pleasure and profit, PCs and Web sites are old hat. The new hotness is mobile devices, smartphones and tablets, which people are buying in ever larger numbers and using for everything from banking to shopping and more.

That’s the finding of a new research report from the networking concern Juniper Networks. Its 2011 Mobile Threats Report found that the amount of malware created for mobile devices across all operating systems more than doubled in 2011 over the previous year. Juniper said it found nearly 28,500 samples of malware, up from a little more than 11,000 in 2010. Most of them — more than 46 percent, in excess of 13,000 samples — targeted Google’s Android operating system, Juniper said. Another 41 percent targeted the older Java ME operating system.

And what kind of malware was it? Spyware, mostly — stuff designed to capture information and send it on to someone else. More than 63 percent of the malware found could track a phone’s location, collect financial information, and other stuff you’d probably rather your phone didn’t do without you knowing about it. Another 36 percent were Trojans sent via text message. These Trojans run in the background and send text messages to premium-rate numbers the attacker owns, then collect the fees generated for sending the message.

And what about Apple’s iOS? Apple’s tight control on the application ecosystem — the iTunes App store, where all applications have to be approved — has so far given it a pretty good record on security. That doesn’t mean it’s completely out of the woods, Juniper says. Apple doesn’t provide developers with the information they need to create security screening programs that run on the phone itself. That means that if, for some reason, its application-vetting process fails — let’s say some app contains an evil feature that no one notices before it’s too late — there’s no competitive set of third-party security companies providing software to help clean up the mess afterward.

In one example during 2011, a security researcher found a way to upload an unapproved app to iTunes by faking the code-signing process used for approved applications. It proved the point that a chink in Apple’s armor did exist, and Apple later issued a fix.

Juniper predicts that it’s going to get more complicated this year. While Google has started to actively scan applications on its Android Marketplace for malicious code, that only means that third-party app stores will become more attractive targets. And as certain apps become popular across many platforms — think office applications — attackers will go after those in much the same way they did popular applications on the PC. That smartphone you have in your hand may soon be a digital battlefield.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120215/for-hackers-attacking-phones-and-tablets-is-the-new-hotness/feed/0Networking Start-Up Nicira Wants to Mess Up Cisco and Juniper's Businesshttp://allthingsd.com/20120205/networking-startup-nicira-wants-to-mess-up-cisco-and-junipers-business/
http://allthingsd.com/20120205/networking-startup-nicira-wants-to-mess-up-cisco-and-junipers-business/#commentsMon, 06 Feb 2012 04:59:13 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=171472For the last several months, I’ve been tracking the movements of Nicira, a start-up company that has been operating in stealth mode, but which has been raising eyebrows mainly for the people it has hired: Bruce Davie, described by some as a networking industry demigod from Cisco Systems; Alan Cohen, a former VP of Cisco’s Enterprise business; and Rob Enns, a former Juniper exec, are the trio that caught my attention. So have the investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA, as well as VMware founder Diane Greene and venture capitalist Andy Rachleff.

On Monday, the company is officially taking the wraps off its plans. Nicira — which I’m told is pronounced like “nice era” — aims to be the vendor of a new networking technology that’s built specifically for the age of cloud computing.

One of the most important enabling technologies of the age of the cloud is something called “virtualization”: As computers have gotten more powerful, thanks mainly to the progress of Moore’s law and ever-better chips — a single computer can, with the aid of software like that created by VMware, act like it’s 10 or 20 or 40 different computers, all at once. Each “virtual machine” has, to its user, all the properties of a physical computer, and ensures that a single machine is used in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. Customers who use cloud services can quickly “spin up” new virtual machines as needed to meet new demands, usually within minutes.

But generally speaking, networking hasn’t kept up. The pipes through which bits pour in and out of data centers have gotten faster, but they haven’t gotten much smarter. Where cloud servers are flexible, precise and easy to manage, networks are, by comparison, blunt instruments. Meeting new demand means adding new capacity, and that usually means adding new hardware to the mix, and that usually takes weeks, if not longer.

If you’ve ever wondered if it were possible to “spin up” a virtual network as readily as you do a virtual machine, wonder no more, for that is precisely what Nicira wants to offer you, without the addition of a single new piece of hardware, but rather only some software that runs on your existing server. You don’t even need to have especially advanced networking hardware.

Its the kind of thing that could give big enterprises some new flexibility in managing their network infrastructure, particularly as need and demand peaks and drops, whether by the day or because of a seasonal change that happens just once a year.

The company already has customers: AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace and the Japanese telecom giant NTT are all using Nicira, the company says.

Nicira calls its product an NVP, or network virtualization platform, and it is being described as the sort of advance that comes along perhaps once every quarter-century. That’s a bold claim, but the argument on which the company is making it holds water. On a day-to-day basis, where you deploy an application in a data center is as much a function of how much networking capacity you have available as it is one of computing capacity.

Virtualization on servers allows you to spread a single app over as many physical machines as needed, but the network connecting those machines is what it is, and if it isn’t up to snuff, you can either enhance it by adding new routers and switches, or live with it. The result is that you can’t be as flexible with deploying apps as you’d like, and that certain machines end up being underutilized by as much as one-third, which is costly over time. You end up having to buy more servers, then pay to run them and cool them.

The Nicira NVP, as CEO Stephen Mullaney told me, “decouples” a virtual network from the physical network hardware. “All of the intelligence, all of the control, all of the services now get done in the virtual space.” The result, what was once a dumb networking pipe carrying bits into two different virtual machines running on the same one, can now be programmed to act in vastly different manners, according to rules in the virtual realm. In much the same way a single computer gets turned into a dozen, a single network can be subdivided and act like a dozen individual networks. Or the reverse: Several networks can be cobbled together to act like one. And a virtual network can be created on the fly in minutes, just like a virtual machine.

A network you can deploy in minutes saves a lot of money, because it allows you to move quickly as your networking needs change. Most big companies who demand the heaviest network loads have agreements with their service providers — usually big telecom companies — that a request for new capacity requires a week or more, because it requires the physical presence of technicians who have to install and provision new gear. But what if you can reconfigure your network in 30 seconds to meet the needs of some new application? That’s exactly what eBay’s Cloud Architect JC Martin found he could do after installing Nicira’s software on the company’s servers. EBay is a Nicira reference customer.

Other reference customers had other interesting experiences and uses to report. Japan’s NTT uses cloud data centers to run some 10,000 virtual desktops — think PCs that are all virtual machines — and found that it was easier to quickly switch between data centers during the rolling blackouts that have become the norm since that country’s earthquake last year.

There is, of course, a great deal more technical detail, but the point you have to get is that this company is out to disrupt the networking industry in a way that it hasn’t been disrupted in a long time. The traditional solution to networking problems is more, better, faster hardware, and companies like Cisco, Juniper, and Hewlett-Packard, among others, are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to sell more of that hardware.

But what if you could look a sales rep from one of those companies in the eye, and tell them that their latest million-dollar router or switch isn’t needed? Once upon a time, before the days of virtualization, if you needed a new server, you had to buy one and have it installed somewhere. Now you can, in most cases, rent space on one within minutes, or literally provision another with a few clicks of a mouse. It changed the expectation and much of the calculus of the IT industry. Many companies never buy their own servers at all, and rent space from cloud providers like Amazon, Rackspace and Joyent.

Exactly what a similar disruption might mean for networking vendors is a little hard to imagine, but if the folks at Nicira are right about the potential this technology of theirs has, it looks like that disruption is coming, one way or another.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20120205/networking-startup-nicira-wants-to-mess-up-cisco-and-junipers-business/feed/0Akamai Confirms the Rumors, Nabs Cotendo for $268 Millionhttp://allthingsd.com/20111222/akamai-confirms-the-rumors-nabs-cotendo-for-268-million/
http://allthingsd.com/20111222/akamai-confirms-the-rumors-nabs-cotendo-for-268-million/#commentsThu, 22 Dec 2011 13:19:57 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=156188Another Israeli tech start-up has wound up in the hands of a U.S. company. Earlier this week, Apple appeared to have acquired the Israeli chip start-up Anobit.

This time the target is Cotendo, a company that uses a network of 30 data centers distributed around the world to put video content physically closer to consumers, and thus speed up delivery, especially to mobile devices. The acquirer is Internet concern Akamai, which says it will pay $268 million, plus the assumption of unvested options.

Cotendo had been reported to be the subject of a bidding war between Akamai and rival Juniper Networks. Breathless reports at the time, sourced to enthusiastic Israeli newspapers, valued Cotendo as high as $350 million. The deal will close during the first half of 2012.

Even at the lower price, the deal marks a nice exit for several U.S.-based venture capital funds. Cotendo raised $7 million from Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital in 2009, and then another $12 million in a round joined by Tenaya Capital last year. In June, it took a $17 million strategic investment from Juniper and Citrix Systems.

Cotendo had grown into an Akamai competitor, with a reputation for being faster at some things than Akamai, and also cheaper to boot. That made it an obvious Akamai target, given its history of acquiring rivals — usually after suing them. In 2005, it took out Speedera Networks for $130 million, after a contentious patent lawsuit between them. Akamai had sued Cotendo last November. So the next time Akamai sues someone, set your stopwatch, because the defendant may be the next one to be acquired.

Akamai’s statement on the deal is below:

Akamai to Acquire Cotendo

Combined technology and teams expected to help accelerate pace of innovation in cloud and mobile optimization

CAMBRIDGE, MA and SUNNYVALE, CA – December 22, 2011 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. and Cotendo announced today that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Akamai to acquire Cotendo.

Helping to mitigate the challenges of operating in a hyperconnected world, Akamai provides a secure platform over which businesses can engage users across the Web, mobile, cloud, or a mix of public and private network environments. Cotendo offers an integrated suite of Web and mobile acceleration services. The combination of the two companies’ technologies and teams is expected to increase the pace of innovation in the areas of cloud and mobile optimization.

“As we look to accelerate growth across the dynamic landscapes of cloud and mobile optimization, we are excited to be joining forces with Cotendo,” said Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai. “Cotendo’s technology, partnerships and people are a strong complement to Akamai. Together, we believe there is tremendous opportunity for our combined technologies as enterprises embrace the move to the cloud and seek solutions for an increasingly mobile world.”

“The Cotendo team is very proud of our accomplishments in delivering proven and effective solutions for accelerating Web and mobile assets. By combining our innovative technology and employees with Akamai, we expect our customers and partners will gain access to a comprehensive, global platform and wider portfolio of leading-edge services supported by some of the most experienced providers in the industry,” said Ronni Zehavi, CEO and co-founder of Cotendo. “We look forward to working with Akamai in an effort to create the strongest offering in the industry.”

Founded in 2008, Cotendo is headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with a technology center in Israel. Cotendo currently has approximately 100 employees, with over 50 based in Israel.

Under terms of the agreement, Akamai will acquire all of the outstanding equity of Cotendo in exchange for a net cash payment of approximately $268 million, after expected purchase price adjustments, plus the assumption of outstanding unvested options to purchase Cotendo common stock. The closing of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, is expected to occur in the first half of 2012.

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo has hired Heidrick & Struggles for its CEO search.

It will be a dicey job, since the effort is on a separate track than the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s wide-ranging strategic review, which is looking at a range of options including the sale of the company.

That’s why many see the move as window-dressing for Yahoo’s board, rather than any real interest in hiring a new leader.

Sources said that will make the search a difficult one for Yahoo, since any CEO candidate would be coming into a very volatile situation. In addition, Yahoo has been struggling — Struggles, struggling, get it? — to recharge its advertising and search business and also its product innovation cycle.

Heidrick has worked for Yahoo previously, in the now ill-conceived placement of Bartz by partner John Thompson. A different partner will be handling this assignment, sources said.

The pool of possible CEOs to lead Yahoo is not a large one, but could includes execs such as Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson, Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, Skype CEO Tony Bates, John Pleasants of Disney’s Playdom, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and any number of top Google execs, as well as Yahoo board member and Akamai President David Kenny.

(I am, of course, waiting by the phone for the call.)

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.

]]>http://allthingsd.com/20111013/exlcusive-yahoo-hires-heidrick-struggles-for-ceo-search/feed/0Cisco Enterprise VP Alan Cohen Joins Stealthy Start-Up Nicirahttp://allthingsd.com/20111010/cisco-enterprise-vp-alan-cohen-joins-stealthy-startup-nicira/
http://allthingsd.com/20111010/cisco-enterprise-vp-alan-cohen-joins-stealthy-startup-nicira/#commentsMon, 10 Oct 2011 11:00:05 +0000http://allthingsd.com/?p=130367Cisco Systems, the networking giant that has lately been known for rebuilding itself, cutting its headcount and resetting its growth expectations more than anything else, is losing a senior executive to the stealth networking start-up Nicira.

Alan Cohen, Cisco’s vice president for Enterprise and Public Sector, has agreed to join Nicira as its vice president of marketing. Cohen has more than 20 years’ experience in tech marketing and product management. He’s been on Cisco’s team since 2005, when it acquired Airespace, a maker of wireless networking switches, where he was VP of marketing. His resume includes stops at IBM, the old Baby Bell phone company US West, Tahoe Networks, Coopers & Lybrand and the U.S. Department of Energy. He’s a grad of the New York University Stern School of Business and American University.

By my count, Cohen will be the seventh person connected to Cisco in some way to join Nicira’s senior ranks. Nicira, which is backed by a $9 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz and another investment from VMware founder Diane Greene, is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, Shoretel and Cisco Systems. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively.

Cohen’s LinkedIn profile also says he spent nine years as a director of the real estate concern General Growth Properties. He briefly sat on the board of flash memory start-up Violin Memory until Cisco’s archrival Juniper Networks invested in that company earlier this year.

As a Cisco VP, Cohen may have been barred from being a director of a company that Juniper invested in, but now he’ll be working with some Juniper alums. In January, we reported that Nicira had hired Rob Enns, Juniper’s former VP of engineering.